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INSTITUTE INDEX: A brief history of the hell that is Louisiana's Angola prison

Number of years that Glenn Ford, a black man wrongfully convicted of murder by an all-white jury, spent on death row in the notorious Louisiana State Penitentiary, better known as Angola prison, before being freed this week: 30

Year in which Ford was sent to Angola, making him one of the longest-serving death row prisoners in the United States: 1984

Current age of Ford, who acknowledges feeling resentment over the decades of life stolen from him following a deeply flawed legal case: 64

Rank of Angola among the largest maximum security prisons in the United States: 1

Year in which a former Confederate major bought the Angola plantation and in its former slave quarters began housing prisoners, who worked the plantation and were leased to private companies for levee construction: 1880

Year in which the state of Louisiana took control of Angola's inmates following newspaper accounts of brutality under the convict leasing system: 1901

In the early 1950s, number of Angola inmates who sliced their Achilles tendons with razor blades to protest brutal conditions: 31

Period during which Angola gained notoriety as "The Bloodiest Prison in the South" because of the number of inmate assaults: late 1960s

Number of Angola prisoners who were typically stabbed to death each year in the early 1970s, when slavery was also commonplace inside the prison: about 12

Period in which the federal courts intervened to bring reforms to Angola following a prisoner lawsuit: mid-1970s

Number of years that Herman Wallace, who was sent to Angola for armed robbery and became a Black Panther activist there, spent in solitary confinement after being convicted of murdering a prison guard despite no physical evidence linking him to the crime, which he maintained he did not commit: 41

Number of days after being released from Angola upon orders of a federal judge following the overturning of his conviction that Wallace died of cancer: 3

Size in feet of the solitary cell that Albert Woodfox, a Black Panther activist who with Wallace was also convicted in the guard's death and maintains his innocence, is still living in today, despite federal orders that he be freed: 6 x 9

Number of times Woodfox's murder conviction has been overturned to date: 3

Number of times Angola Warden Burl Cain reportedly offered to release Wallace and Woodfox from solitary confinement if they renounced their political beliefs and accepted Jesus Christ as their savior: 1

Year in which four members of Congress asked the Justice Department to investigate Angola's "egregious and extensive" use of solitary confinement: 2013

Year in which three Angola death-row inmates filed a federal lawsuit claiming that oppressive heat conditions worsened their medical conditions and violated their constitutional rights: 2013

According to their lawsuit, heat index in degrees Fahrenheit reached on Angola's death row at one point in 2012: 172

Number of days between May and August of 2012 that inmates on one tier of Angola's death row suffered through heat indexes of more than 126 degrees, according to another lawsuit: 85

Date on which a federal judge in Louisiana ruled that conditions on Angola's death row amount to "cruel and unusual punishment": 12/19/2013

Date on which the same federal judge "sternly lectured" attorneys for Louisiana over their "lack of candor" about awnings and soaker hoses being installed last summer while heat indexes were being measured as part of the lawsuit over excessive heat: 3/12/2014

Given the cap Louisiana places on payments to people it's wrongfully incarcerated, total amount Glenn Ford will be eligible to receive for each year he spent locked up at Angola: $11,000

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This article shows how bad Angola is. Again it need to be reformed from tip to toe. Prisons should be used only for the most heinous of all crimes. Also, the practice of sending drug addicts to prison should be discontinued at once. When it comes to heinous crimes, that includes a man who killed a little girl I knew from church in 1975.

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